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A timely reminder

I posted this a while ago…..I read it just now and it was the reminder I needed. Time keeps going doesn’t it and you just have to keep moving with it and pausing to remember things sometimes…..

The wind and my thoughts are very similar.

I love chasing the weather, feeling it whip and snap, feeling the darkness of the sky leaning on you, urging you to quicken your step. The wind whirling and whipping at your skin, rushing through trees shaking the leaves, making them sound like hundreds of angry librarians ‘shushing’ at once.

Weather that makes you notice nature, real weather that heaves and sighs like the earth is breathing and exhaling it’s woes. I can feel the rain heavy in the air about to fall and I’m alive and rushing trying to beat it. I walk faster and fumble for my key, then the door is open and I’m in.

And all of a sudden the noise stops, all is still again, my skin bites from the waves of freshness that have just washed against it. Every inch of me is wide awake and ready because this is what it is to be alive isn’t it, feeling things with every inch of yourself, connecting to this world with your physical body, knowing this world with your mind and feeling it with your soul? I can hear the wind roaring and rumbling around the house, the rain begins to throw itself against the window, but the sound is muffled by the walls that now surround me.

The wildness of that walk followed by the stillness of home, is not lost on me. It makes me want to jump with joy, exclaim and dance for this earth of ours and this life of mine. The abundance of energy that is there for the taking, to be seized and transformed into something of my making.

That somebody I know, just a few years older than me has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, how can that be?

How can our human minds make sense of or comprehend such a thing? To be told you don’t have long to live, that there is a limit to your days here at my kind of age, when, at my kind of age, I feel like my life is just beginning, that I am just sorting out who I am and starting to edge in a direction, choosing my path and stumbling along it. I can’t imagine being told, well you’ll never know whether your stumbling turned into long, powerful strides because your path is being clipped short in the stumbling, finding your feet stage.

It is playing on my mind. But there has to be good out of terrible things else the human race would never cope and would have given up a long time ago. So I’m searching for the good and the good is the people it has brought together again and the effect it is having on people’s lives in reminding them to enjoy what you have got right now, to see every day as a whole life lived. To not wish for things in the future at the cost of ignoring the vast opportunities and wealth of potential we have in each moment we live in the present.

I started my postgraduate masters course in History yesterday and I enjoyed and savoured every moment of it. Finally, after 2 years of trying and working, saving and struggling in jobs that were not me I have arrived at the point it was all for and doesn’t that make this point so much more worthwhile than if it had just been handed to me with no effort or meaning 2 years ago?

The hard way is hard along the way but so much more worthwhile at the end of it. Everything I have got it is going into it this year, 2 years of hard and frustrating work means that I know now, the result of all that must get my ‘all’. I am in such a better place to do well now than 2 years ago. Now, I know the true value of ‘hard’ work, how to motivate myself and just how much it means to me. Things I would have been too naive to know before.

This is a written reminder to myself, this whole post that life is a wonderous, far-fetched, all consuming thing, that events work out the way they do for reasons that will one day become known.

‘What matters is not whether we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them. I sometimes think that every new situation, good or bad, can enrich us with new insights. But if we abandon the hard facts that we are forced to face, if we give them no shelter in our heads or hearts, do not allow them to settle and change into impulses through which we can grow and from which we can draw meaning-then we are not a viable generation.’ (Etty Hillesum)

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I'm a collector of words and ideas...sometimes my own sometimes other peoples.
This blog is part of that collection and record of a chronicled life.
'and days careen
like the waters
of a river rushing
to the sea' (Sparklehorse)